Shaping up and selling out, sort of

This blog is important to me and has been (in its various forms) for about 3 years now. I’ve been sidetracked a lot along the way and changed my site over and over again. Only in the last 8 months or so did I start consolidating all of my writing interests into one blog. Managing only one site has been both a relief in terms of work and an encouragement to keep things more up-to-date. Consolidation in and of itself isn’t really a great reason for change, but I want to project a more comprehensive view of myself from this blog, so I’m hoping this has helped somewhat.

Toward that end, I recently took the step to purge my site of pretty much everything but this blog. You will no longer find a page at http://www.jfwiii.net because it simply redirects here. Many of the subfolders are still there, so you can still access some of the Braves WPA analysis I did (until the amazing Fangraphs site came along and made my work pretty much obsolete) by browsing the /braveswpa folder. Unfortunately in this process, I did delete the /suite_boys folder of videos that my friends and I created while we were at Harding. They were good for some laughs (and still are), but I felt the need to conserve some space and didn’t really want to devote a page on the blog to keep hosting those videos. If you want to see them and don’t already have them, I can send them to you in a massive e-mail, mail you a CD, or temporarily host them again from the site. I promise I’m not embarrassed.

In keeping with the trend of change, I also have some good news about by Harding Basketball coverage, which has always been one of the main drivers of my site’s still-miniscule traffic (the superhighway here is still just a backwoods trail). Starting immediately, all of my basketball posts will also appear at MVN.com, a sports blog community with a home for pretty much every pro team and a growing college section. Harding will be the first Division-II team with a presence on MVN, which is incredibly cool (but don’t ask me, I’m biased now). Their site is currently being revamped and expanded, and I suppose I’m part of that expansion. My address there will be http://mvn.com/ncaa-harding.

Part of my goal for this site has always been to bring some exposure to a basketball program that I came to appreciate during my time at HU. Division-II basketball doesn’t get much love from the press, but I got involved enough to decide I wanted to change that. This will hopefully spread out the scope of coverage of D-II basketball and open up a lot of schools with great programs to similar opportunities.

Perhaps the best part of this opportunity is that I won’t be required to sacrifice anything on my own site. I can continue posting the same material both here and on MVN, so that those of you who read this site to keep up with me don’t have to bookmark two places if you don’t want to. On the other hand, I’d also encourage you, my loyal readers (both of you), to join the discussion there, if such a thing starts to take place.

I’ll be posting a couple of things there (and not here) to introduce my coverage of Harding basketball, but in the end, that coverage will be one and the same. The first post will probably be up sometime tomorrow (Wednesday), and hopefully I’ll have the stats introduced in time for a review of Thursday’s game. Carry on now.

[UPDATE 1/24: The first post is now up. Expect the site to be a bit buggy at first, since MVN is trying to roll out a bunch of new sites all at once. The sidebars are not formatting right for me (I’m viewing it in IE7 here at work), but if you’re using Firefox (recommended) or Opera, maybe it looks good.]